Let's get this out of the way: If Imaad Wasif's name sounds familiar, chances are you read that he's serving as axe-for-hire in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' four-strong touring troupe. That tidbit might have you thinking Wasif's music is serious balls-out rawk, but you'd be dead wrong. Instead, the skeletal campfire compositions on Wasif's self-titled debut manage to be even tamer than those on the benign Show Your Bones. Hanging his fragile melodies on little more than an acoustic guitar, these songs are stripped down to the point of emaciated frailty. At times, it works and the austerity creates a potent sense of intimacy-- you feel like you're right there with Wasif in some half-lit room, flinching at the scratch of string-slides and rubbing your eyes from all that incense smoke. Other times, though, you'd kill to have some lush orchestral arrangement or backing band bury the neo-hippie schmaltz of his lyrics.
The album starts off with its most arresting tune, "Spark". Wasif picks through a repeated phrase while his crystalline voice carves out the melody. By the song's chorus, the muted growl of a fuzzed-out guitar seethes beneath acoustic strums as a second track of Wasif singing in falsetto joins in: "A spark I forgot had me laying on the ground/ The dark's all I've got and it never let me down." The album's full of these romantic musings on imperceptible conflict: light and darkness, clarity and confusion, what's on the surface, and what lurks beneath it. But as delicate, single-note piano accents bring a little light to the second verse of "Spark", the music itself becomes Wasif's way of negotiating these irreconcilable dichotomies. In the next song, "Out in the Black," he sings, "I found a space in between/ For all those memories/ Out in the black." His voice seems to literally inhabit that liminal space between the opposing forces he describes as it divides two divergent guitar lines: a gentle acoustic and a slightly distorted, twanging electric.
But the rest of the album doesn't sustain the highs of its first two tracks. At their best, the remaining songs are soothing, if unremarkable. But, at their worst, they plummet into less tuneful and more lyrically cloying territory. On "Isolation", Wasif apparently thought it would be a compelling illustration of loneliness to confess that he's been "crucified for weeks" and "can't shake this old monkey" or, better yet, to simply wail the word "isolation." (High school journal keepers, take heed: you have a new poet laureate.) It's a real shame because Wasif's most striking musical strength is his voice, which is refreshingly pure and unaffected. Too bad, then, it doesn't have something purer and less affected to sing.
